Navigating the NFL's complex broadcast schedule is no easy task. In fact, even video streaming services that offer channels with NFL broadcast rights only cover in-market and prime-time games. In other words, if you don’t live in your favorite team’s local market, you can’t watch most of that team’s games. NFL+, an expanded version of the service previously known as NFL Game Pass, lets you listen to every live NFL audio broadcast and watch game replays, regardless of your location. You can also watch select games live, depending on the context. Rabid football fans might not be able to get over the fact that they can't watch all live games on all devices, but for everyone else, NFL+ is the simplest way to watch every game this season.

What Can You Watch With NFL+?

The primary appeal of NFL+ is that it lets you watch replays of every NFL game broadcast this season after it airs, along with any game from as early as the 2009 season. None of these replays are subject to regional broadcast restrictions or blackouts, which means that anyone in the country can watch any game. To put that into perspective, that’s up to 16 regular-season games each week that you can replay. At best, you would get six or seven games using a live TV streaming service, depending on the schedule.

In addition, NFL+ offers condensed game replays that typically cut the runtime to under an hour and don't include any ads. You also get the cool Coaches Film mode, a feature that makes it easy to study and digest plays.

The service includes live content, too. For example, you can listen to full audio streams of each game as it airs. NFL+ also lets you watch live, out-of-market preseason games. You can even watch live, local prime-time games, but only on your smartphone or tablet.

Apart from the service's game coverage, it also offers on-demand NFL-centric news shows produced by the NFL Network, such as Good Morning Football, NFL Fantasy Live, and NFL Total Access. These are not live shows; rather, the previous day's episode gets posted every day. On-demand episodes of America’s Game, Hard Knocks, NFL 360, and NFL Film Session are all available to stream, too.

Don’t confuse NFL+ with NFL RedZone. The latter is a cable channel that caters to fantasy football fans, and shows scoring plays in a continuous block on Sunday afternoons. NFL RedZone is not a part of the NFL+ package, but you can subscribe to the RedZone Mobile add-on alongside NFL+. The channel is additionally available as an add-on for other NFL streaming services, as we explain below. NFL Sunday Ticket is also a separate service, currently exclusive to DirecTV, but most likely moving to a different streaming platform in the near future.

If you happen to live in the same broadcast market as your favorite team or otherwise don’t care what game is playing, live streaming services may be a better option. FuboTV, Hulu + Live TV, and YouTube TV are currently the best choices for NFL coverage, because they include all the major broadcast networks (for watching Sunday afternoon and Sunday Night Football games), NFL Network (Thursday Night Football games), and ESPN (Monday Night Football games). All three services offer the NFL RedZone channel via an add-on package. Unfortunately, if you don't live in your favorite team's home market, the NFL makes it difficult for you to watch those games live.

If you are willing to seriously cut down on the amount of football you watch, consider these primarily on-demand services: Paramount+, Peacock, and Prime Video. A subscription to Paramount+ Premium includes a live stream of your local CBS network, which means you can watch in-market Sunday afternoon NFL games on that channel. Paid Peacock subscribers can stream Sunday Night Football games. Live broadcasts of Thursday Night Football games are part of Prime Video's lineup. All three of those services include other live sports, too. Check out our roundup of the best sports streaming services for all the details.

How Much is NFL+?

NFL+ comes in two pricing tiers: the base subscription and NFL+ Premium. For $5 per month (or $40 per year), you can enjoy all of NFL+'s live content, as well as its ad-free, on-demand library. This cheaper tier essentially replaces functionality previously found for free in both the NFL and Yahoo Sports apps. NFL+ premium costs $10 per month (or $80 per year), and is more analogous to the old NFL Game Pass. It has all the full and condensed replays for all devices, as well as Coaches Film. There is a seven-day free trial. The NFL RedZone Mobile add-on costs $34.99 per season.

If you can make peace with watching replays instead of live games, NFL+ is the cheapest way to watch all the games this season. Live TV streaming services cost much more money per month and, as mentioned, only guarantee you full coverage of prime-time and in-market games.

Sling TV’s Orange and Blue plans each cost $35 per month, but you can get them together for $50 per month. FuboTV, Hulu + Live TV, and YouTube TV all start at $64.99 per month. DirecTV Stream charges $69.99 per month for its base tier. Paramount+ Premium and Prime Video are only $9.99 and $8.99 per month, respectively. Peacock Premium undercuts them all at $4.99 per month.

You can watch NFL+ via a web browser, mobile platforms (Android and iOS), or media streaming devices (Android TV, Apple TV, Fire TV, and Roku), but it's no longer available on game consoles (PlayStation and Xbox). Speaking of mobile apps, NFL+ is just one section of the NFL app, which as we explain later, lets you watch live, prime-time and in-market games for free.

NFL+ is only in the United States. Check out NFL Game Pass’s International Guide for more information about other markets. For live NFL games in Canada, Dazn is another option.

NFL+ on the Web and Mobile

NFL+'s web interface isn’t impressive; it looks more like a plain old website than a video streaming service. In testing, we noticed that some pages lagged a bit or took longer than expected to load.

You navigate the experience via a top-level menu with the following sections: Games, Shows, and Explore. By default, you don’t see scores, so you won't have game results spoiled before you get a chance to watch the replays. A profile icon lives in the upper-right corner of the interface. Here, you can make changes to your subscription or cancel it, as well as manage your favorite teams. Unfortunately, the app lacks a watch list or watch history.

The Shows section displays an overview of the on-demand content that's available for streaming. The Games section defaults to game replays for the current NFL season, with horizontally scrolling categories for each week. You can also browse back as far as the 2009 season from a drop-down menu, with teams all listed. You'll see the available replays when you click a game card.

The Listen Live section lists the current week's games and lets you listen to live audio when those games air. Typically, you get a choice between the home broadcast, away broadcast, SAP broadcast, and Westwood One broadcast. However, audio-only listening is restricted to live games, not replays.

The NFL Shows category simply displays the service's on-demand content. Shows are separated into different categories, such as Documentaries, Hall of Fame, and News. You can also watch classic games and draft days.

NFL+ doesn't have a Search section on the web. Previously, you could search for teams, players, or in-game highlights, and then filter the results even further. You could even sort results by play type (such as big plays or touchdowns), down, teams, week, and season, plus see the results in the form of video highlights. These omissions are a big step back.

On mobile, there isn’t a separate NFL+ app to download; it’s a part of the NFL app. That app (along with the Yahoo Sports app) gives you free access to in-market Sunday afternoon games and prime-time broadcasts, with the caveat that you can’t cast these streams to a larger screen. We had no issues logging on the app on Android or iOS devices.

The NFL+ section is accessible at the bottom navigation bar. The interface within this section resembles the web app's Home section, but the design looks better on the smaller screen. When you click on a game’s thumbnail, you get the option to watch a full replay or the condensed game mode. Again, we didn't see any options for the Coaches Film or audio-only modes. The web interface's data (plays, insights, and stats) is available on mobile, too. The app supports a picture-in-picture (PiP) mode, which is a nice touch.

NFL+'s Video Playback Experience

The web app’s playback interface has significantly regressed since our previous NFL Game Pass test. Aside from the standard playback controls, you still get 10-second rewind and fast-forward buttons, as well as a closed caption toggle. Gone are buttons for enabling slow-motion playback, changing the streaming resolution, and switching between the playback modes. You can no longer simultaneously view multiple games, either. The mobile playback screen carries over the rewind and fast-forward buttons from the web, as well as the closed caption toggle.

NFL+ can stream games at up to 1080/60fps, but that resolution and frame rate varies based on the quality of the original broadcast. Without a button for adjusting those settings on the playback screen, it's not easy to determine the resolution of a given stream.

Hulu + Live TV, Paramount+, and YouTube TV both support 1080p/60fps live streams for select networks and platforms. FuboTV is even set to broadcast some NFL games in 4K this season. YouTube TV supports 4K live streams via an add-on, but it's not clear if that service will stream any NFL games at that resolution.

NFL+ says that it does not place any limits on concurrent streams, which is a useful feature for large households. In testing, we streamed game replays on a laptop and phone at the same time without any issues. For comparison, DirecTV Stream lets you simultaneously stream on as many as 20 devices via your home network.

We didn't experience playback issues over a Windows 10 laptop’s Wi-Fi connection (200 Mbps download). Videos quality reached their full resolution and the audio played in sync. The live audio feature worked fine on a desktop browser.

NFL+ Accessibility and Other Features

NFL+ offers closed captions for all its content, and options for customizing them from the playback screen (such as font size, font color, background color, and character highlight). However, the captions annoyingly cover the bottom part of the screen, and often conceal the score box that networks overlay on game broadcasts. This problem is worse when viewing the game in full screen, because there's no option to adjust the captions' positions. In testing, the captions also ran significantly behind the in-game action, particularly with the condensed replay modes.

You won’t find the audio description feature that Apple TV+, Netflix, and Prime Video offer alongside their on-demand content. Audio descriptions are audible narrations of scene changes and character actions that are not discernible through dialog alone. This feature is typically reserved for narrative content rather than sporting events, but some of NFL+'s on-demand shows might benefit from this accessibility option.

NFL+ does not support parental controls or multiple profiles, but neither of those capabilities is relevant to the service’s content. DVR recording also doesn’t make much sense for NFL+, since there isn’t much live video streaming content available. However, NFL+ does not support offline downloads on mobile, which is a major omission. Since the NFL games on the service are not live anyway, it would have made sense to include this capability. The length of full NFL games is suitable for long travel times, and we could imagine some subscribers wanting the ability to listen to game audio the same way they would listen to an offline podcast.

NFL+ and VPNs

A VPN is an excellent way to protect your privacy online. Sometimes, a VPN’s ability to mask your IP address interferes with video streaming services. For example, some content may be locked to certain regions, which is why many streaming services try to block VPN traffic outright.

We tried streaming content on NFL+ from both a Windows 10 PC and Android phone which were connected to a US-based Mullvad VPN server. Unfortunately, w couldn't stream replays on the Windows 10 laptop, and the NFL app wouldn't initially load on our test Android device. However, we got around the mobile issue by first launching the NFL app and then connecting to the VPN.

Even if your VPN and video streaming services work for now, that’s no guarantee that they will continue to do so. Most video streaming services actively work to prevent you from streaming content over a VPN connection.

Watch Every NFL Game…With a Delay

For NFL fans who don't live in their favorite team’s market and don’t want to pay for several expensive streaming services, NFL+ is the next best thing to watching the games live. The service lives up to its promise of hosting replays of every NFL game at streams of up to 1080p/60fps, as well as offering select live games on select devices. However, despite the rebrand, the web interface has fewer features than it did in the past, the closed captioning settings are still a bit of a mess, and we miss the audio replay options.

If you live in your favorite team’s market, you should consider a live TV streaming service instead. Hulu + Live TV and YouTube TV are our top picks for live TV streaming services due to their excellent feature sets and comprehensive channel lineups.